I was in a car accident on Saturday. Thought I would write about it, but now I don't want to. I'm still alive, a bit battered, not too bruised physically.

This is what I wrote to my cousin, Pamela. I'd add a bit more, maybe yet.

Today I have a therapy appointment for the accident. I will be fine. Bashed my left knee on something in the car when we were hit. My left boob is still decorated in pretty purple designs from the seat belt. A scratch on my right leg that is a complete mystery. But, its nearly gone now. At first I was feeling ok, but by the time I got home the back of my neck, shoulders and chest were tight and hurting. Tension I'd guess. A hot shower helped. Still having some pain in my back and sides but its getting better.

I've never been in a car accident before. It was so interesting to experience. Especially since I'm ok. When you see movies/ TV shows of people getting hit by another vehicle it is surprisingly just like that. I saw a black truck flying towards our car. It didn't seem real and then it hit and there was a spray of car bits (almost all from his truck) like an instant tornado. Different men stopped to help and I didn't know which were in the accident and which were just passing along at the time. It was confusion, and assorted other words but it also felt like being part of a story, not quite an adventure but something like that. The bits of his truck and the other car were everywhere! Like big pieces of confetti that would not be good to step on.

It (truck) had landed on Mom's driver side door and she couldn't get out. The truck was smoking right by her window and (now) she says she was scared. At the time she kept saying she was fine and I was the one who was showing more affects from it. But, now she says it has taken the wind out of her sails and she hasn't yet gone outside for her garden as she usually would be almost every day. Mom's brother (our Uncle Wayne) suggests she call a lawyer for/ about the accident. We met the man who caused the accident there, at the time. Although I have ho idea why/how he took the turn when another car was that close, he seemed like a regular kind of guy with an orange t-shirt and a long grey beard. Like someone who has a cottage and a boat to enjoy on the lake. But, most people at fault for accidents are likely everyday types of people. That part won't be like the movies and TV shows.

So its not so easy to think about starting anything legal about it. Mom's insurance have decided to repair her car rather than write it off. We were hoping it would be a write off because she still has payments for it and that won't change even though its now a car that has been in an accident. So it won't sell as well any time later. Also, a bit creepy to be in that car again. As if it betrayed us somehow, though of course, it wasn't the car's fault, or ours.

I don't know what is wrong with me. Now, aged 60, I guess I still have some curiosity about it, but I don't really want to know any more. It won't help now. I'm too old and too sad? tired? something like that, to fix whatever it is now.

But, I think there has to be some reason your Grandmother and Father would rip you apart as a child. No one would just randomly stomp on every least thing about a child and make them feel so awful about who they are, what they are? I have wondered if I were somehow something else entirely.

It's not just a kid thinking they're hard done by. Whatever the wrongness has been, I've carried it with me all my life. At this point I can say all my friends are ghosts and it is literally true. Two are actually deceased, the rest have all ghosted me over 50+ years. Even the most recent, who I said would ghost me (she said she wouldn't do something like that) but she did. I've waited hours for friends to show up, who never did again. No explanation, no clue what it was about. I think they found the wrongness I've never understood and they left, ghosting even before it became a verb.

I never had a real boyfriend. I tried. I asked men out on dates, they didn't show up. Or there was one date only with those who only wanted sex and that was just because I didn't co-operate and let myself be fucked by someone who didn't know me. Really, how far different is that from a rape, just less violence? Maybe that's too much to say, assume. But, I've been molested, so I'm not untouched by that either.

I did have a husband, for just over a year. He said he was my friend when we wrote as penpals at the age of 14. Later he said he loved me. Even twenty years after the divorce I thought he had at least been faithful, that much of a friend, someone who cared about me. I was wrong. That was a hard blow, in an email without apology. It wasn't a letter to a friend. I think he began ghosting me during the first few months we were married, but I didn't know. I did think he liked me, finally at the age of 30 or so, someone liked me enough to still consider myself a friend. I misled myself, or was misled? I don't know and its in the past, not to be repeated. I won't try it again.

So here I am at age 60. Not a spinster, but childless. I didn't think I would be in this sort of life. I thought I would have a 'normal' life with a family, children and husband, a career of some kind, a home to live in and feel at home in. I look after my Mom, in her house, we drive around in her car. Mom cares about me. I help Mom, I've helped family and others. At the end of my life that's all there will be. But, whatever was wrong with me will be gone along with me. I can't think I've passed it on to anyone else. Hard to be sure when I don't know what has always been so wrong with me.

I'd like to be a different person. But, I don't know how when the results are always the same. I feel inferior to everyone. I feel people see whatever is wrong with me and I have no idea how to hide it. I try. I try to be a good person. I try to be kind and nice. Even though I don't think that's really who I would be if I were not trying so hard to hide whatever is wrong with me. In the end it doesn't matter, time is running along and I can't stand still/ untouched in it.

If there is a heaven of some kind, I believe more in reincarnation, like recycling as the Earth tends to do. But, if we get a heaven, I hope I can be myself but able to live a real life, without carrying around this wrongness that has carved such a miserable hole in my life here. I'd like to see and know who I could have been, if there weren't something so wrong with me.

I'll say Good bye here. But, I'm not popping off. I'm staying, waiting each day until the last day. I can just keep to myself mostly, not attracting attention to whatever is wrong with me, or bothering anyone. It's so much easier to just be alone.

In the morning I wake up with the wreckage of yesterday, all my yesterdays, around me.

In one corner of my mind, a dusty corner, I can see a place where its tidy, there is just enough, rather than an overabundance. I've cleared away the burdens, the tasks to be done, the responsibilities I didn't ask for, the promises I thought I owed to myself. Life in that corner is uncluttered. Each morning I set about completing things, continuing things and there is nothing holding me back, nothing to feel trapped by or disappointed about myself.

But, I don't live in that corner. I step carefully in the room where I can't really see the corners and I avoid hurting myself. Physically, by stepping carefully around the floor and the obstacle course I've created. Mentally, by keeping everything, as much as I can, safe with me in this room. Its not who I am, its who I have become.

Sleep gets in the way
before I've hardly started
time is quicksilver.

I wrote this haiku this morning.

I often feel so many things, people, etc take over the time you have, the need for sleep being just one more of those. I love the time I am immersed in something. Learning something, sorting out something tangled, or reading a book with a good, deep story. There are always interruptions. Sleep is at least from myself, my body and brain needing physical care. Still, I resent it, a divider of days. "You can't stay up all night". But I can and I have. That early morning time before most people are awake, when the sky is a dark purple and the birds are warming up for the day. It's wonderful. It's quiet and a bit chilly and private. Only seconds, maybe minutes and then there is a sound in the house. Someone else is awake and its gone. That little bit of time, outside the world, family and things to do. It's something that is still fully mine. But it pops like a soap bubble and is gone.

Disengaging with narcistic people as a way of protecting yourself. Not great for relationships with immediate family over the long haul. In the end, you lose track of yourself due to ignoring yourself.